


Antonym

by Poppelganger



Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: Cannibalistic Thoughts, F/M, Japanese Literature, Romance, Suicidal Thoughts, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-28
Updated: 2015-05-24
Packaged: 2018-03-20 01:56:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 11,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3632310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Poppelganger/pseuds/Poppelganger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ken's love of books has led him to ill-fated meetings twice before.  The third time it happens, he is not the one on the receiving end of misfortune, but it still hurts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. First Memorandum

**Author's Note:**

> My first foray into Tokyo Ghoul. This will probably be a fairly short story.
> 
> Please be warned that this is one of the darker things I've written. Suicide is a recurring theme and elements typical of the canon material also turn up from time to time. Do not proceed unless you feel you are comfortable reading that sort of thing.
> 
> I make it sound awful, but really, this is a love story, or at least what tends to happen when I set out to write one.

_"There are some people whose dread of human beings is so morbid that they reach a point where they yearn to see with their own eyes monsters of even more horrible shapes."_

_\--Osamu Dazai,_ No Longer Human

 

 

Ken Kaneki thinks it probably isn’t fair, but he’s started trying to figure people out by what they read.

Anteiku sees mostly quiet types and literati like himself, ghouls looking for a reprieve from their blood-filled, frantic lives, and humans looking for nothing more than a peaceful atmosphere.  More often than not, customers bring a book or a magazine and spend half an hour reading while they sip at their coffee.  Ken thinks of himself when he sees the humans and their obliviously content faces, unaware that they are sitting within arm’s reach of someone who could tear them limb from limb or reduce them to nothing but a red stain on the pavement.

Not that they would.  Anteiku is a place of peace and nurturing where all are welcome.  Fear—to live another day, to stave off starvation without inciting the wrath of the dominant ghoul in the territory—has no place here.

Ken finds his eyes wandering to the books clutched in the hands of new customers, acquainting himself in their taste in reading material before he even memorizes their name.  Most would assume that it’s simply in his nature as a student of literature to form impressions based on what people read or at least carry with them, and that’s part of the truth.  The other part is that he’s just trying to be careful, because as it turns out, he really can tell a lot about a person depending on what they bring with them to pass the time.

He sees the classics most often.  Murasaki Shikibu’s name comes through the door frequently, in the smooth and slender fingers of youth as well as the calloused and spotted hands of the elderly.  Some are quite matter-of-fact and taciturn, while others seem to be stuck in a perpetual reverie, thoughts flowing like careless calligraphy, beautiful and incomprehensible.  They are linked by their vitality, a desire to both know and understand, and Ken finds that they make for the best conversational partners as well as the best listeners.

Now and then, he spots someone reading Yumeno Kyuusaku.  They are difficult to talk to, always immersed in their psychedelic nightmares, their surrealistic landscapes, their gothic tragedies.  They are well-spoken when they choose to speak and confident in their own abilities, and though they are not the type to give an enthusiastic greeting, their small smiles and the slight tip of a head holds just as much emotion.

Readers of Sen Takatsuki come in two stripes.  They are gentle and cautious, pleasant and trusting, broken and yet eager to keep living.  But they can also be capricious, patient, two-faced, and _voracious_.

He still isn’t sure how to tell the difference on first glance.

The bells above the door jingle and Ken looks up.  The newcomer is not a regular, he’s certain; this is the first time he’s seen her.  She’s wearing a high school uniform with a navy blue blazer and plaid skirt, and her hair is tied in braids.  Ken looks at her face just long enough to notice that she’s wearing glasses and smiles in a welcoming manner.  She returns it timidly and goes to sit at a table by herself towards the back, away from the window. 

“Welcome to Anteiku,” he says as he comes over, setting a napkin down on the table, “Can I get you anything?”

He looks down and finds Mori’s _The Wild Geese_ resting in her hands.  The first conclusion he draws is that it’s assigned reading from school, but he notices folded corners and scribbles when she opens it, highlights and hearts drawn in the margins, worn binding and pages sticking out at odd angles.  It’s a beloved text, perhaps one she’s read many times before.  He can’t help but smile a little wider. 

“Ah, could I have some coffee?” she asks, “Any kind is fine.  I’ve never tried it before.”

“Any kind?” he repeats.

She meets his eyes with hesitation.  “Surprise me,” she says with the slightest smile.

Ken’s heart beats a little faster.  “Coming right up,” he tells her, and goes straight to work.

 _The Wild Geese_ has never been his favorite work, but he doesn’t particularly dislike it.  In his experience, most people who enjoy it are fonder of literature in the transition between old and new, stories of Westernization, the Meiji era, and impossible love. 

The rest, he has found, simply relate to it.

He turns to glance at the stranger from across the café, and though he tries not to read too much into the expressions of a person whom he knows little to nothing about, he pays attention to the way she sits, legs pressed together and face buried in the lonely life of the usurer’s mistress, taking up as little space as possible and throwing herself into a tragedy. 

He thinks he knows which type she is.

“I thought you might like something sweet,” he says when he returns and sets the cup down in front of her.

She thanks him, sliding a pen between the pages before she sets the book aside, and takes a tentative sip.  Her eyes light up.  “It’s good,” she says, as though surprised, “What’s in it?”

“A bit of caramel.”

“Thank you,” she says, looking up at him with much more gratitude than he thinks coffee deserves, no matter how good. 

She doesn’t open the book immediately, choosing instead to blow the steam off of the top of the cup and continue drinking as she stares into space.  Ken glances around briefly; she’s one of two customers, and the other is still flipping through a magazine with a half-empty cup of tea.  He decides he can linger a moment longer.

“I couldn’t help but notice what you were reading,” he says.

The girl glances not at him but at the back cover that’s facing up, her gaze full of fondness.  “Maybe I’m a little old-fashioned, but I really like it,” she tells him, “It’s one I keep coming back to.  I’m in the middle of _Norwegian Wood_ right now, but I just had to read it again.”

“You must really love it if you stopped halfway through Murakami for it.”

Her smile finally reaches her eyes.

“Ken Kaneki,” he introduces himself, “My favorite novelist is Sen Takatsuki.”

“Eika Ishihara.”  Her fingers idly stroke the spine of her book.  “I like Mori, but my favorite is actually Osamu Dazai.”

The words hardly register.  Ken is leaning against the table a bit, in his element once again for what feels like the first time in forever, and Eika seems like the kind of girl he would have dated if he’d had the chance.  He feels guilty for being attracted to her, for trying to make this into something it can’t ever be, but at the same time, he’s craving this kind of interaction, something intellectual and gentle and maybe even a little flirtatious, something that isn’t stained so deeply with blood that it’ll never be clean again.

If his coworkers notice him sitting down with a customer, they don’t say anything.

“I read _The Setting Sun_ just recently,” Ken says, “It was one of those works where I really needed to take a minute after I read it to just think about it.”

“Exactly,” Eika nods, “There aren’t many tragedies that can compare to Dazai’s.  Kazuko goes through so much, but she chooses to continue to struggle rather than die.  It’s admirable.”  She laughs.  “And ironic, in a twisted way.”

“Honestly, I’m surprised you mentioned Dazai.  His reading is rather heavy, though I suppose I read him for the first time in high school, too.”

“Oh, you’re not a high school student?” Eika asks curiously, “I just assumed, I guess.  I thought we were the same age.”

“I only graduated last year,” Ken explains, “I’m at Kamii now.”

She blinks in surprise.  “Kamii?  That’s really impressive.  I hear the literature department there is excellent.”

“It is.”  They haven’t been talking for quite half an hour yet, but already Ken is starting to notice little things, like the way she tenses her shoulders and plays with the ends of her long sleeves when she gets nervous, how the tips of her ears blush and her glasses slide down her nose whenever she turns her head.

He’s playing at something dangerous.  Eika doesn’t know what he is, what he’s capable of; if she did, she wouldn’t be in the café anymore.  But he knows she’s shy, knows she’s a little bit like him, reads some of the same books, likes some of the same things, and that she must be at least a little bit attracted to him if the way she steals glances at him when she thinks he isn’t paying attention are any indication.

What they’re doing is harmless.  They’re both still young; Eika might walk out of here and find someone else, and he might do the same.   He doesn’t see any reason he shouldn’t enjoy something this innocent while it lasts.

Eika’s coffee is long gone and the sun is setting by the time she decides to leave.  Ken deflects her apologies for keeping him, “accidently” brushes hands with her when he stands up, and holds the door for her.  “I’ll probably be back tomorrow,” she says without looking directly at him, more of a mumble, but Ken catches it all the same and gives her a reassuring smile.

“I’ll be here,” he says.

Eika’s secretive smile vanishes as the door shuts behind her, but Ken remembers it hours later, long after Nishiki has mocked him for it and Touka has told him that sitting and running his mouth doesn’t count as working, into the wee hours of the morning when he finds he can’t sleep because he’s still thinking about Eika Ishihara and what she symbolizes.

She is everything that was taken from him and everything that he will never have again—innocent, oblivious, _human_.

If anything begins between them, he knows it’ll be doomed to failure from the beginning.  But it doesn’t stop him from wanting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those still on board, please strap in, I would really hate for you to fall off of the emotional roller-coaster you just got on.


	2. Second Memorandum

To both his relief and disappointment, Eika Ishihara darkens Anteiku’s doorway for days to come, becoming a predictable occurrence in his routine.  Every day at the same time in the afternoon, likely just after her high school has gotten out for the day, she takes the same table in the corner, gives Ken a little smile that beckons him over, and they talk at length about literature.

With each passing day, he becomes more and more concerned.

Eika has yet to come back with the same book two days in a row.  She seems to read in rotation, going a few chapters before she “feels the need” to switch to something new.  Ken can’t imagine reading like that, finally immersing himself in a story only to pick up a different book altogether.  She always says it’s just a feeling she has, a desire to move on and get through as much as she can, and Ken doesn’t push the matter, because she’s enjoying her reading, and that’s all that matters.

Because of her habits, he has trouble making her fit neatly into his literature-based organization of the world.  She has no pattern, no rhyme nor reason to her choices.  One day, she has an approachable and personable Banana Yoshimoto novel, and the next, she’s reading the passive-aggressive descent into madness of Ryuunosuke Akutagawa.  She claims her favorite author is Dazai and yet he’s never seen her reading one of his books, which is fine.

There are two kinds of people who read Dazai; one of them seeks rationalization, cold and clinical analyses, answers. 

The other just wants to die.

Ken can see it without having to think about it too hard, can interpret the anxious averting of her eyes and the way she pulls in on herself when she’s uncomfortable as the movements of someone enduring something difficult.  But he doesn’t want to think about that, doesn’t want to even consider it, because it scares him.  The thought that he’ll go with Yomo for supplies one of these days and find her lying twisted in a gorge or waterlogged in a canal after a rainstorm, that he’ll turn her over and find her oval glasses askew on her face, eyes gray and unseeing, that he’ll have to _take her back and cut her into pieces and wrap her in meat packing paper_ makes his stomach turn.

He’s made peace with what he is.  He eats to survive like any other animal on the face of the earth. 

But he doesn’t think he could eat Eika.

He glances across the table at her as she expresses her love for Eiji Yoshikawa’s reimagining of history, drumming her fingers on the back cover of _Kappa_ —she likes to talk about the books she read the day before, and a bit about what she plans to read tomorrow, and Ken has stopped trying to understand any reason behind it because at least he can expect it—and he looks, closely, at her.

Eika has the kind of pallor to her that tells him she doesn’t go outside very often.  She’s always wearing her uniform when she comes, always in long black sleeves and wearing dark stockings under her skirt.  He wonders if she gets cold easily, because she never takes her jacket off.  She doesn’t shiver but she always makes herself small and sits with her arms close to her body.

She always smells good.

Ken doesn’t have the knee-jerk horrified reaction anymore when he notices these kinds of things.  As a human, he remembers that he didn’t have to be hungry to appreciate sweet and savory scents that wafted by.  Eika’s scent is particularly noticeable, probably because he pays careful attention to most everything else about her. 

“Someone told me I should try Souseki Natsume’s work again,” she says lightly, “But it’s so light-hearted.  It’s not that it isn’t enjoyable, I just don’t usually choose to read things like that.”

“You don’t like light-hearted stories?” Ken asks.

She rests her elbows on the table and laces her fingers together, setting her chin over them.  “No.  They’re unrealistic.”

The book rests between them, and Ken dares to run his fingertips on the cover, feeling the indents of the embossed title.  Eika looks down and watches his hands with interest and longing, like she wants to reach out, but she never does.

They look up at the same time, cheeks dusted with a hint of pink, smiling awkwardly. 

“I guess,” she says softly, “I don’t mind something light-hearted from time to time.”

Ken should be happy that his courtship is clumsy and that Eika is so painfully naïve that she doesn’t know how to move things along any faster, but it’s miserable.  He feels a pain in his chest, like someone plunging their hand inside of him and squeezing their fingers around his heart until it bursts.  He looks at Eika, and Eika looks at him, and he can’t remember the last time he wanted something so much.

“Kaneki?” her voice comes out as little more than a hopeful whimper, and he realizes his hands are cupping her face.  He doesn’t remember when he did it.

“Sorry,” he says, but he doesn’t move. 

He should say something.  He should tell her that her eyes are beautiful, or that her skin is soft, but he can’t find the right words, can’t think of a way to phrase it that would do her justice.  Ken is not foolish enough to think that he’s in love with her—if anything, he’s in love with the _idea_ of being in love, of holding onto something that seems so human.  He wants Eika so he can prove that he is not a monster.

And that’s the wrong reason.

He finally pulls his hands away.  “Sorry,” he says again, and the word comes out much more firm than before, “I wasn’t thinking.”

He expects disappointment.  He doesn’t expect her to look quite so crushed.

“It’s,” she bites her lip, “It’s alright.”  Something about her face is different.  She looks like she’s just remembered something that she’d spent the last few days forgetting, something she would’ve rather gone on not knowing.  “It’s late.  I should go.”

Ken chokes back the desperate _“wait!”_ that wants to come out, giving a simple nod and a strained smile, watching her scoop her book up and hold it to her chest, the book that he touched, and holds the door open for her to scurry out of without so much as a glance back.

It was the right thing to do, he thinks. 

And yet, it feels so wrong.

*

Ken stays late to help clean up and give himself something else to think about.  He thinks everyone must have seen him earlier with Eika, because they’re all giving him space and carefully not asking about her.  Even Touka, now well-versed in the art of balancing two lives, holds her tongue despite all of the words he sees bubbling at the surface, halfway between scolding and reassuring, wanting to pull him aside and tell him not to worry about it, but she doesn’t do anything.

Of all people, it’s Yoshimura who comes down the stairs, sends the others away with a gesture Ken doesn’t see, and goes to the sink to rinse out coffee mugs with the tacit expectation that Ken will join him. 

“What’s that young lady’s name?” he asks curiously.

Ken hesitates to answer.  The words are heavy in his mouth.  “Eika Ishihara.”

“Eika Ishihara,” Yoshimura muses, “I’d never seen her before recently, you know.”  He smiles sagely.  “You two seem to get along quite well.”

“We both read,” Ken says vaguely, keeping his gaze on the washrag in his hands.

“It’s okay to have feelings for someone, Kaneki.  You’re not denied that because of what you are.”

“I don’t know.  I’m not sure what I’m feeling, exactly.” 

Yoshimura doesn’t answer.  They spend a moment in silence, drying the last of the dishes and putting them away. 

“Can it work?” Ken asks before he can stop himself, “Between a ghoul and a human, I mean.  Is it even possible?”

“Yes.  It can work.”  Yoshimura looks very tired suddenly as he looks at nothing in particular, drifting into a memory.  “It takes effort and sacrifice, more so than if you were the same, but it can work.”

“It’s not fair to her, though, is it?”  Ken shakes his head.  “If I don’t feel as strongly about her as she feels about me.”

“You’re still quite young, Kaneki,” Yoshimura says, “People at your age aren’t supposed to worry about that sort of thing.”  He steps back from the counter and smiles.  “For what it’s worth, I don’t think I’ve seen you smile quite so wide in a very long time.”

He thinks about Eika again, the books she reads, the way she sits, how she smells.  “Yeah.  I guess you’re right.”

He hopes she comes back tomorrow.

*

Like clockwork, Eika appears the next afternoon, looking much more hesitant than before.  She takes her usual seat, sets her book down, and steals a glance at Ken, who makes his way over after a moment of internal deliberation.

“Coffee, please,” she says softly, “The same way you always make it.”

“Coming right up,” he says, chest constricting when she doesn’t return his smile.  He returns with her drink in record time, setting it down in front of her and watching her fold down the corner of her current page.  As she pushes her book to the corner of the table, he steals a glance at the spine.

 _No Longer Human,_ famously written by Dazai the same year he committed suicide.

He takes the empty seat across from her, and her eyes flick up to meet his.  “It probably looks bad, doesn’t it?” she asks, “For me to be reading something like this, I mean.  Don’t get the wrong idea.  I just love Dazai’s work.  All of it.  Even this one.”  She takes a sip, eyes closed in serenity, and Ken watches her dark lashes flutter over her cheeks.  “Last year,” she says quietly, “Nothing happened.  The year before that, nothing happened.  And the year before that, nothing happened.”  She looks down at the cover fondly.

“That’s not from _No Longer Human,_ ” Ken says, “That’s from _The Setting Sun._ ”

“I know.”

For the first time, she’s come in with her favorite author, and she’s discussing him, too, although the pattern thus far suggests that she should be moving on to Edogawa Ranpo next, and she had been reading Akutagawa the previous day.  She’s breaking routine, and it shouldn’t bother Kaneki as much as it does, but he knows how meticulous she is.  There has to be a reason.

“About yesterday,” he starts to say.

She cuts him off.  “Don’t apologize, please,” she says, “I think we’re moving at different paces.  Being involved…like that…would be difficult.”  The corners of her lips turn up.  “But if you don’t mind keeping me company a bit more, I’d appreciate it.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Ken says, relieved, managing to smile himself, “Come by whenever you want company.”

She blushes and laughs into the back of her hand, and all at once, the pain in his chest vanishes like it was never there.  He forgets that he was worried about anything.  It feels as though whatever barrier that had been resting between them has crumbled now, leaving a carpet of shards that Ken doesn’t dare tread through to get closer, but just being able to see and hear her clearly, for her to smile, is enough.

They lose track of time easily enough.  Enji drifts by to gently remind Ken that it’s time to close up and Eika jumps to her feet, glancing back worriedly at the dark sky out the window.  “I’m sorry again,” she says when Ken pushes back from the table, “I’m always taking up so much of your time.”

“I don’t mind,” Ken says honestly. 

She looks again at the night sky outside, almost pointedly, and Ken glances back at the others for permission.  “Kaneki,” he hears, and turns to find Yoshimura approaching him, smiling stiffly, “Why don’t you walk Miss Ishihara home?  It’s a bit late for her to be going alone.”  He says it in almost a playful tone, but there’s something urgent in his eyes. 

“Of course,” Ken says quickly, and Eika tries to hide her smile by turning away.

He tries to think of things to talk about as they walk, but something in the air seems to have shifted.  Eika is silent, eyes forward, and she doesn’t look like her usual anxious self.  There’s something wrong with the look on her face, something that Ken feels like he should be able to read but he can’t put his finger on it. 

He doesn’t get the chance to give it much thought; ten minutes away from Anteiku in a small suburb, Eika stops in front of a house.  “Thank you, Kaneki,” she says, voice lacking the tremble it usually has when she speaks to him.  The words are so genuine and heartfelt; he’s not sure what exactly she’s thanking him for, but he suspects it’s for more than walking her home.  She’s smiling, and it’s so unreserved, so different from what he’s used to.  “I always have fun talking to you.”

“Me, too,” he says.  His throat feels dry.  Something isn’t right.  “See you tomorrow?”

Her gaze shifts to her feet.  “Yeah,” she says, “I guess so.”

She almost sounds disappointed.

 _Something is not right_. 

“Okay,” he says, struggling to get his feet to move.  She smells different; it’s subtle, so subtle that Ken thinks he would have missed it if he wasn’t always trying to figure her out.  He can smell perspiration thick and salty in the air, stale and musty, and something like bile.

He locks eyes with Eika who looks back at him, desperately, pleading something that he can’t make out.

“Ishihara,” he asks, “Are you okay?”

She nods slowly.  “Yes,” she says hoarsely, “I have to go.  See you tomorrow.” 

Ken wants to stop her, grab her arm and demand she tell him what’s really wrong, but he’s frozen to the spot.  He’s never felt anything like it before, never experienced another person’s sensations so strongly, and he thinks it must be because of his newfound sense of smell.  Usually, he’d be moving on instinct, unable to process any sensation with hunger fogging his mind, but his thoughts are clear tonight. 

He knows he just smelled Eika Ishihara’s fear.  


	3. Third Memorandum

Eika slips into Anteiku the following Monday afternoon, shuffles to her table of choice, and smiles at Ken like nothing ever happened.  He brings her coffee without asking, and she takes it without hesitation.  He has himself together a little better today, knows what he wants to say, but he falters when he sees the book on the table, brand new, a receipt being used as a bookmark.

“Souseki Natsume?” he asks, “I thought you weren’t fond of his work.”

Eika adjusts her glasses.  “I didn’t really give him a fair chance,” she says, “I thought I’d try again.”

He glances down again.  “ _Kokoro_ , huh?”

“Have you read it?”

“No.  You’ll have to tell me what you think.”

She smiles shyly.  “No way.  You have to read it yourself.  I’ll lend you my copy when I’m done.”

Ken very nearly loses everything he prepared to talk about at the look of pure happiness in her eyes, but he resolves to say something, pulling out the chair across from her.  “Ishihara,” he says as he sits down, “I realize we don’t really know much about each other.”

“That’s alright, isn’t it?”

He hesitates.  “No,” he decides after a moment, “No, it’s not.  I want to know you better.”

She’s momentarily stunned into silence, and then a blush overtakes her features, slowly spreading from her cheeks to her ears.  “Oh,” she stammers, “Well, if you really want to.  But you should go first.”

Ken laughs.  “I think you probably know a bit about me already,” he says but indulges her anyway, “I go to Kamii and study literature.  I live on my own.  I’ve read everything Sen Takatsuki has ever written.”

Eika isn’t quite looking at him, seemingly preoccupied with other thoughts.  “Isn’t there more to you than just books?” she asks.

Ken is surprised at the question, but recovers quickly.  “Well, yeah,” he says, a bit uneasily, hesitant to continue.  His life is not what it used to be.  He has interests aside from reading, but so much of his time anymore is consumed by worrying, mourning what he used to be and learning to embrace the part of him that thinks Eika smells good in a mouth-watering kind of way.  He clings to literature because, despite how much he’s changed, that alone has remained the same.

She doesn’t leave him floundering too long.  “It’s alright,” she says gently, “I’m defined by the books I read, too, because reading is all I really enjoy doing.  That’s all there is to me, really.”

“I’m sure that’s not true,” Ken starts to say, the words dying halfway out of his mouth when Eika’s heavy-lidded gaze sweeps across the table and up to his face.  He gets that feeling again that something is very wrong.

“It is,” she insists, “And there’s nothing wrong with that.”

There are a few other customers quietly minding their own business, tucked into their own corners with a steaming coffee cup and a magazine in their hands, and Touka and Nishiki are milling about waiting for something to do, but it seems to Ken to be far too quiet.  The silence is oppressive, almost deafening, and every sound Eika makes is only accentuated, every scuff of her shoes against the floor, every tap of her nails on the table.  He can hear his heart beating in his ears, and he can smell fear coming off of her in acrid waves.

Something is wrong, and he needs to know what it is.

“Ishihara,” he says, and though his words are soft, she still looks startled, “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” she says easily, too easily, almost automatically.

Ken tries again.  “I don’t mean just right now.  I mean in general.  Are you doing okay?”

“I’m fine, Kaneki,” she repeats, annoyance seeping through her smile at his constant prodding, “Is this because I came in reading Dazai the other day?  I told you he’s my favorite.  Don’t read into it too much.”

Ken is certain that she’s lying, but she’s resolute in her answer.  “Sorry,” he says, “I guess I have a tendency to do that.”

The distracted look returns to Eika’s features, as if she’s dreaming while awake.  “You know, Kaneki,” she says suddenly, addressing him without meeting his gaze yet again, “I just got to the part where Yozo and Horiki are playing that word game with antonyms.  Have you ever tried that?”

She’s going back to Dazai again.  Ken shakes his head.  “It’s been a little while since I’ve read _No Longer Human._   What was the game exactly?”  His eyes start to wander.  Eika continually tugs at the sleeves of her blazer and only her fingers poke out at the ends, the nails bitten down to the quick and mangled in a way that looks painful.  There are so many scabs and red spots around the cuticles that he wonders if it hurts for her to hold things. 

“An antonym game,” she says, “One of us comes up with a word, and then the other person will give the opposite.”

“Ah, so if I say black….”

“I say white.” Eika’s smile is distant and her expression disengaged.  “But if I say white, what will you say?”

Ken hesitates.  “Red,” he says after a moment, thinking back to his sophomore year when he first read Dazai.  The sections about antonyms always bothered him, partly because it was so nonsensical and seemingly subjective, and partly because of the futility the game seemed to represent, a categorization game played by the protagonist that only highlighted the differences between the way he thought and the way all of the human beings around him did.

It bothers him even more now than before.

“And the antonym of red is black,” Eika concludes, “But colors are easy.  How about something more abstract?”

Ken doesn’t answer right away, because he doesn’t really want to play, but Eika is waiting.  “What’s the anonym of vestigial?” he asks.

“Loved,” Eika says, almost without hesitation.  “And the antonym of loved?”

“Hated,” Ken says, then shakes his head.  “No.  Abandoned.”

“The antonym of abandoned is coddled.” 

Ken tries one last time.  “Ishihara, are you sure…?”

“Kaneki,” she says, pleading, “Keep playing.”  Desperation shines in her eyes.

He takes a deep breath and tries to ignore the way her fear fills his nostrils, sharp and sweet.  “The antonym of coddled,” he says quietly, “Is destroyed.”

And just like every time they talk, she manages to divert attention away from herself.

*

At the end of the day, Ken is taking the last of the dishes from the tables to wash when he comes across a cheap-looking, pastel-colored wallet where Eika had been sitting.  A student ID card is nestled safely in the plastic pocket on the inside, and her name, face, and school are printed on it.  She isn’t usually so careless.

Eika didn’t stay as long today, and the sun is only just setting.  Ken wonders if her school is still open.  “I’ll be right back,” he tells Touka, already halfway out the door in his work clothes, and she doesn’t bother trying to stop him.

Her high school is a short walk and one train stop away, and Ken passes by a few lingering students finishing up club activities for the day on his way to the office.  “Excuse me,” he says to the woman at the desk, and takes the wallet out of his pocket, “I work at a café downtown, and one of our customers left their wallet.  It seems she’s a student here, so I was hoping you could get it back to her.”

“That’s so kind of you,” the woman beams and takes the wallet from him, but her smile falls when she opens it and looks at the ID.  “I’m sorry, you said a customer left this at your café?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Today,” Ken says, confused at the sudden change in mood.

The woman nods.  “Thank you,” she says gently, “I’ll hang onto this for now, though I’m not sure when I’ll be able to get it back to its owner.”

Ken has a terrible, sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.  “Why is that?”

She gives an uncomfortable sigh, turning the wallet over in her hands like she’s debating handing it back to him.  “This student hasn’t come to school in two weeks,” she says at last.

It takes a minute to process the words.  “Two weeks?” he repeats weakly.

“Yes.  These things happen, I suppose.  You hear about hikikomori and the like on the news, but you never think it’s going to be someone you know.”

_Hikikomori?_

Ken has always just assumed that Eika came to Anteiku right after school because she always showed up around the same time and was always wearing her uniform.  He hadn’t thought that she might be a shut-in.  It’s curious, then, that she would come by the café at all.  He can’t help but wonder what led her there, and what’s been bringing her back time and time again, especially if she isn’t leaving the house for anything else.

He thinks it would be better if he took the wallet back, but the woman at the desk doesn’t seem willing to give it up, so he lets her hold onto it. 

He has questions for Eika that he’s sure she won’t answer.


	4. Fourth Memorandum

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for disappearing last week! I can never remember where I post my notices about being gone anymore, haha.

"Confidence."

Eika shifts uncomfortably, uncrossing and crossing her legs. It's far too hot for a long-sleeved blazer today, but she refuses to take it off. "Self-pity," she says.

"Unconditional love." He's getting better at this; after several weeks of this game, he's started to get the hang of how she thinks.

It's not so different from Yozo, the protagonist of her favorite book.

"Disdain." Eika picks at her hands now, tearing the skin around her nails off in peels and leaving angry-looking red and pink spots, either comfortable enough in his presence or confident that he won't stop her.

"Admiration?" He isn't so sure of that one.

"Maybe," Eika says, and he knows he's wrong.

"How about something else? What's the antonym of grief?"

She tilts her head, thoughtful. "Ecstasy." She doesn't even drink the coffee anymore, but he keeps bringing it anyway, letting it grow cold on the table between them, staining a ring in the bottom of the cup.

"And the antonym of ecstasy is suffering."

"Then the antonym of suffering," Eika says without a moment of hesitation, "is death."

Ken suddenly regrets asking.

"We're stuck now. The antonym of death is suffering, and the antonym of suffering is death."

"Do you really feel that way?" Ken asks.

Eika pauses. "Yes," she says, but she sounds unsure.

"I would disagree," he tells her, frustrated when she doesn't meet his eyes, "I would say that the antonym of suffering is numbness, not necessarily death."

"Death is numb," Eika argues.

"No." Ken shakes his head. "Death isn't numb. Death is nothing." She looks uncomfortable suddenly. Ken tries to smile at her, but it's painfully forced. "I guess we're playing a synonym game now." She doesn't answer. He figures now is as good a time as any. "You left your wallet here yesterday."

"Ah." She looks past him at the wall. She has to have known; surely she looked for it earlier before she came to Anteiku, wondered how she would pay for her coffee, and scrounged something up and put it into her pocket.

"I dropped it by your school. I figured you might get in trouble without your ID." He pauses. "They told me you haven't been there for two weeks."

She tears too deep and a droplet of blood rises to the surface of the wound beside the nail on her index finger. Ken doesn't see it because of the way she hurriedly hides it under the table, but he smells it, and he starts to salivate.

"So," Ken forges on, "You should go and pick it up sometime."

"Thank you, I will," she says, still looking away. He has a feeling that she won't. "Could we play the game some more?"

Ken closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. "Where were we?" he asks hollowly, resigning at last to the fact that Eika simply will not let him in. He's tried to meet her more than halfway, indulge her ramblings and coax the truth out of her, but she refuses, and he's tired. Honestly, he barely knows her. He doesn't know why he tried as hard as he did.

"Suffering," Eika says, apparently conceding his earlier point, "The antonym of which is…luxury, I suppose."

"Ah. Right."

Eika is picking at her hands under the table—the scent is sweet, strong, teasing him—but he'd never tell by looking at her face. She looks so relaxed now, so happy that he's going along with it, not quite smiling but not frowning either.

Eika is damaged somehow, afraid of things that Ken doesn't know about and can't protect her from, and she tears the skin from her fingers and averts her gaze when she feels uncomfortable. She turns inwards, bottles up everything she feels and lets it simmer inside of her, perhaps more content to be hurt than to hurt others.

She's human, Ken thinks, watching her come alive ever so briefly as they play their word game, she's so very, painfully human with her innocence and ignorance and gentle ways, and that, he realizes, is the reason he tried so hard.

*

On a lonely stretch of highway just outside of the city, it isn't all that unusual to find bodies lying in the gorge beneath, limbs sticking out of bushes, stiff with rigor mortis, as though beckoning some wary traveler to come find them. Sometimes they are young and wild, all dressed up with nowhere to go, couples who jumped together. Sometimes they are old and gray, unemployed and hopeless, carrying a bottle of pills and a length of rope as if they just couldn't decide. At first, it made Ken uncomfortable, because people are not meant to be so still, but it got easier as time went on. He rationalized it because he had to if he was ever going to stop his hands from shaking, told himself that he wasn't hurting them, that they didn't feel anything, that they didn't really need their muscles and tendons and marrow anymore. They weren't human anymore. It was like walking through the cold storage of a slaughterhouse with raw carcasses swinging on display.

He'd gotten better, he really had.

And then Eika Ishihara walked into Anteiku carrying a book by Osamu Dazai, and it was difficult all over again.

Ken is hesitant now, a slight tremor in his fingers as he reaches for a woman who threw herself from the winding interstate overpass, her car's emergency lights still blinking above them like ghost lights on the side of a mountain. She's alone, and she isn't all that old, and even though it isn't likely, even though her hair is wrong and she's just a little too tall, he still turns her over just to be sure, gently rolling her onto her back and holds his breath as he looks at her face.

It's isn't Eika. It never is. But he always looks now, just to be sure.

*

Later at night, long after that evening's harvest has been carefully packed away, Renji suddenly asks, "What is it?"

Ken tries to keep his voice even. "Nothing."

He receives a look of disbelief. Renji is quiet, not one to speak unless he believes it is absolutely necessary. He's observant, too; surely he's noticed the way Ken has begun checking the faces of the corpses, the apprehension in the gaze that falls upon the young women they find, handling them delicately as though afraid to hurt them.

Ken never answers; apparently, he doesn't have to.

"In my experience," Renji says quietly, "Sometimes, people simply don't want to be helped."

Ken has heard just enough gossip from Kaya and Enji to know that he's talking about himself. According to the hearsay, there was a time when Renji was possessed by his rage, and it drove him to destroy everything he came across on the path to vengeance. They say he changed when he met Yoshimura, but Ken wonders if something happened before that. If he was just tired of being that way.

"In that kind of situation, it's really out of your hands," he goes on, "You have to let them decide for themselves what to do."

_Whether or not to live._

Ken must look as crestfallen as he feels, because Renji's hand comes to rest on his shoulder, gentle and comforting. "And sometimes," he adds, "It all works out."

*

Ken feels Eika's eyes lingering on him as she hesitates in the doorway, slowly making her way across the café. Her usual spot is taken today by a couple of giggling girls from another school, so she chooses the table closest to it. Ken slips the receipt from the store between the pages he's on and sets the book beneath the counter before he goes to make her a cup of coffee.

"You're reading  _No Longer Human_?" she asks curiously.

"It's been a while. I thought I'd give it another read," he says, "Honestly, it's a struggle. I didn't care for it much the first time I read it, and I can't seem to muster the appreciation now."

Yozo, who struggles so much to understand and align himself with the humans around him, eventually reduces them to animals, strange and foreign creatures that love and mourn and fornicate, and he can't understand any of it. In the end, he acknowledges that he is not like them, not in any way, completely disqualified from being human.

It takes no imagination to draw parallels.

"Why are you reading it if you hate it?"

"I never said I hated it. I just don't care for it." He shakes his head. "It…hits too close to home sometimes."

Eika smiles in a way she hasn't in weeks. "I think we all feel a little like Yozo sometimes," she says softly, "Like nobody understands, and like we can't understand anybody."

"In the end, though, I think it usually turns out that we were mistaken." Ken meets her eyes. "Actually, someone did understand. We just didn't notice."

It's one final, desperate attempt, and Ken says the words almost carelessly, not really expecting any good to come of it.

When tears form in the corners of Eika's eyes, he's frozen in shock. She tries to wipe them away on her sleeve and pretend to cough, but he's already seen it. "Yeah," she murmurs, smiling through her tears, "I guess you're right."

Ken goes to get her tissues, but otherwise politely pretends he doesn't notice. "You know," he says, "Yozo and Horiki didn't just think of antonyms. They thought about synonyms, too."

"Synonyms are too easy, though," Eika tells him, "It's easy to group things together that are similar. Coming up with things that are very different is more difficult."

"I suppose." Ken smiles. "What's the antonym of 'farewell?'"

Eika smiles back with all of her heart. "Probably 'welcome home.'"

Ken thinks that, just maybe, things will work out.


	5. Fifth Memorandum

Ken remembers learning about tragedies in one of his classes, back when he still qualified as a human being.  Aristotle had identified key components, beginning with a string of misfortune and ending with catharsis.  By the end of a tragedy, the remaining characters were purged of their anguish, or everyone was dead. 

He knows, and he has always known, that any story he has any part of will inevitably be a tragedy.  It has happened before, again and again, a ceaseless cycle of misfortune and struggle and suffering, beginning with the death of his mother.  He has always been the hapless protagonist forced to watch the world around him fall apart.

But this time, he thinks, he must have been relegated to the role of a secondary character, a bystander who is equally helpless as the story’s centerpiece quietly destroys themselves.

It’s much, much worse.

Eika does not come back the next day.  Ken finds himself anxiously checking the clock every few minutes as he drums his fingers on the counter. Every time the café door opens, he rushes to greet her, only to have to hide his disappointment when it’s somebody else.  _No Longer Human_ rests on the shelf in his bedroom, completely read over the course of the previous night.  He doesn’t want anything to do with it anymore. 

Ken is distracted all day, eyes wandering to the window whenever a girl in a school uniform walks by, heart beating faster in expectation whenever somebody comes inside.  But Eika Ishihara never does show up, and as the day grows later, the literati of Anteiku gradually thinning out and taking their Murakamis and Shikibus and Kyuusakus with them, plastic covers glinting in the light of the setting sun, Ken feels panic mounting.  He doesn’t want to turn the little sign hanging on the door to “closed,” doesn’t want to lock the door and turn off the lights, because she might just be running late.  Maybe she decided to go back to school and she has to catch up on homework.  Ken is smart; he knows her absence doesn’t necessitate a tragedy.

But he is also not an optimist, and he can’t help but worry that it does.

*

The sun is long gone below the horizon, but he’s still sitting at their table, looking out at passing cars and late night foot traffic, when Renji comes to get him for that night’s scavenging.  “Let’s go,” he says quietly, and Ken rises slowly, feet dragging the entire way, hoping against reason that she comes running with a smile and a, “Sorry I’m late!” holding Dazai or Souseki or whatever she wants, _still alive_.  He’s afraid that this will be the night he finds her in the gorge, body broken and eyes lifeless.

He doesn’t understand.  He thought he’s reached her; he thought she’d opened up to him.  He doesn’t want to believe that she’s lying dead somewhere, because Eika Ishihara means more to him than just his humanity now. 

He regrets all of the chances he didn’t take.

*

When they reach the lonely stretch of road overlooking the gorge that feeds much of the 20th ward, Renji suddenly stops walking, refusing to round the corner.  Ken looks back at him for an explanation but before he says anything, the wind changes directions and the smell hits him.

Acrid, sour, fearful.  Somebody is alive out here.

Under normal circumstances, they would check elsewhere and come back later—Ken never thought about it too hard, because the implications of waiting are akin to acting as a vulture, circling a slowly dying animal and waiting for it to finally give in like the death seekers who leap from the overpass—but Ken’s feet are moving before Renji can stop him, and he’s running down the road, looking to where the guardrail is broken and finds his nightmares have bled into reality, dressed in a school uniform with her back turned to him.  The height is the same, the build is the same, and her braids are whipping in the wind.  There’s no mistake.

“Eika!” he calls, all politeness and proper social etiquette having long fled his mind at the sight of her with her toes over the edge, “Eika!!”

Her shoulders stiffen and she steps back to safety, meeting his eyes.  Ken expects tears, inconsolable grief for the life she intends to take, but finds her expression worryingly calm, looking more surprised than anything.  “Kaneki,” she says pleasantly, “What are you doing here?”

“That’s…that doesn’t….”  There aren’t words, not in any book he’s ever read, not in the entire Japanese language, to describe just how lost he feels now, how powerless and confused he is with Eika standing so close to the edge like that, looking like she doesn’t even realize that it’s over when she takes that plunge, like she doesn’t fully understand what it would mean.  “Why are you here?”

Her cheeks turn a light pink in embarrassment.  “I was just….”  She looks around as if searching for the words in the dark around her.  “I guess…” she laughs uncomfortably, a smile stretched painfully across her face, “That’s probably obvious, right?”  She looks down at the gorge, appearing much more like an endless void in the dark of night.  “Do you ever wonder what goes through people’s heads when they do stuff like this?” she asks softly, “When Dazai threw himself into the Tamagawa Canal, what do you think he had on his mind?”

Ken takes a slow step towards her.  “I don’t know,” he says honestly, trying to keep his voice even and his face calm, trying not to let his body betray the urgency he feels. 

“Do you think he remembered the word games he wrote about in _No Longer Human_?” she asks, “What’s the antonym of death, anyway?  We never decided.”

“Eika,” Ken says gently, moving closer ever so slightly, “Did you really plan on jumping?”

She looks not at him, but towards him, eyes to the side.  “I thought about it,” she mumbles, “Dazai, Akutagawa, Hara, Kawakami…they all felt the way I do now.  But I’m a coward compared to them.  I’m afraid to jump.”

_Afraid to die._

“Looking at you, Kaneki, makes it even harder.”  She looks back down at the abyss, and Ken edges closer.  “Actually, you know, I planned to die the first day we met.  I’d always walked by Anteiku but I’d never gone in, so I thought I’d give it a try just once.  Then we got to talking, and I just…I couldn’t do it.  Looking at you makes me want to live.”  She smiles, genuinely, radiantly, and Ken can’t help but smile back, telling himself it’s not too late, it’s still not too late.

“Kaneki,” she says breathlessly, overcome by emotion, “Jump with me.”

He takes a shuddering breath, stepping closer.  “Together?” he asks weakly, “But I thought you said you wanted to live.”

“I can’t do it alone,” she says, “But if you’re with me, I think I could.  That’s why you came out here, isn’t it?  That’s what you tried to tell me before, when you said we’re wrong, that people do understand.  _You_ understand.”

“That’s not what I meant,” he tries to tell her.

“Why else would you come out here?” she laughs, a question that Ken simply refuses to answer.  Her smile becomes desperate.  “Please, Kaneki.  I know…together…we could do it.”

He’s standing beside her now, hesitantly meeting her eager gaze.  He gently smiles back and takes her hand, lacing their fingers together.  “Ishihara,” he says gently, attempting to ground her and return to reality, “I don’t want to die.”

Her smile falls and the light leaves her eyes.  “But,” she swallows, “We could…I can’t do it alone.”

“I know.”  He squeezes her hand and pulls, leading her back to the road.  “So let’s live instead, okay?”

Eika doesn’t pull away and she doesn’t answer, her eyes blank and hollow as she follows him, one shaky footstep at a time.  Ken sees Renji amidst the trees as they walk back up along the road towards town and wonders what he must think, but it doesn’t really matter to him.

Ken is a reader and not a writer, but he’s acquainted with so many stories by now, so many turns of phrase and narrative styles and plot devices, he thinks that, surely, he can rewrite this so it isn’t a tragedy.

The lights of the high rises of downtown welcome them back to the world of the living.  Ken is too tired to remember the way back to Eika’s and ends up going back to his place instead, and it’s only as they’re going up the stairs and Ken is turning the door handle that the tears start and Eika finally begins to cry. 

She cries while Ken sets his bag down and when he gently leads her to sit at the table, and she cries while he tidies up around her, picking up old laundry and plastic bags.  She cries when she shrugs her jacket off of her shoulders at Ken’s insistence, and she cries when he comes to sit beside her.

Her arms are pale and slender, the undersides dotted with dark purple and brownish welts and blotches, bruises in the shape of fingers on her skin.  Eika buries her face into his chest and shudders, and Ken never asks or says a word, but he slowly wraps his arms around her, head resting on top of hers, and wonders what comes next.

*

The sunrise filters through Ken’s curtains, falling across the room towards where Eika is lying on her side, still awake.  Neither of them have slept yet.  Ken told her to take the bed hours ago while he remained sitting at the table, trying to figure out what to do, glancing over at her from time to time and meeting her unreadable expression.

“Sorry,” she says hoarsely, throat raw, the first word she’s spoken since walking through the door.

He’s not sure what she’s apologizing for exactly, but he shakes his head anyway.  “It’s okay.”  He looks over and finds her staring at him, eyes and nose still flushed red but no longer crying.  “Do you want to talk about it?”  Silence settles over them, and Ken quickly amends, “You don’t have to, of course.”  Eika is quiet for a time, eyes moving to look at the slowly growing patch of sunlight on the floor.  “Do you…” Ken hesitates, “Do you wish you had jumped?”

“No,” she says.  “I’m glad you came.  I’m glad you stopped me.”  She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath.  “You know, there’s…something I wanted to tell you.  It’s not really anything important, but I just…I just wanted to say it.”

Ken glances at her, eyelashes fluttering, cheeks flushed, frowning nervously.  He thinks he knows what she wants to say, and even though he’s a little uncertain, he thinks about all of the things people have told him since he met Eika. 

_It can work._

“Maybe you should wait to tell me,” he says, “Until you’re feeling better.”

She bites her lip.  “Yeah.  Okay.”

“I mean, you might be surprised by what kind of answer you get.”  He smiles, and her eyes widen slightly.  “That’s pretty good incentive, right?”

“Yeah.  It is.”  She smiles back, timidly, a little like she used to.  “Thank you…Ken.”

From the way the sunrise sparkles in her eyes, Ken just knows that he’s done it this time.  He’s taken what he’s learned from every author he’s ever read and changed the ending of Eika’s story. 

He’s so overcome by joy that he temporarily forgets about his own story, the one in which he is a protagonist, one that is rapidly approaching the next change in fortune, one that is irredeemably a tragedy.


	6. Sixth Memorandum

“It’s important, I think,” Eika says, one hand resting atop the cover of _No Longer Human_ , “That we recognized where we ourselves are antonyms.”

She had been a little late today, but Ken didn’t worry as much as he used to.  It had been several weeks since he’d found her standing at the end of the road by the broken guardrail--seventeen days, to be precise, because he’s been keeping track.  The first day, she came back with a binder overflowing with papers, two weeks worth of homework that she’d picked up on her first day back at school, and Ken stayed after his shift to help her with it.  She didn’t bring any books with her at first, nor did she even mention them.  Eika worked hard to flood her life with reality, to busy herself with distractions that wouldn’t cause her mind to wander back to the gorge and the words of Yozo, a world she knew she needed to stay away from until she was strong enough to face it.

And now, seventeen days later, she thinks she’s ready.

“What do you mean?” Ken asks.

“Everyone likes books they can relate to,” Eika says, “So we have a tendency to look for things we have in common with the protagonist.  We paint ourselves as synonymous to them.”  Her gaze falls to the table where her fingers are each wrapped in bandages, extra motivation to leave what little nails she has alone.  “‘I’m Yozo,’ I used to think,” she says quietly, “‘I don’t understand other people, and they don’t understand me.  There’s nothing here for me.’”  She pauses.  “But I’m not Yozo.  In some ways, I’m his antonym.  There are people I connect with and care about.  There are,” she hesitates, blushes, and looks to the side, “There are people I love.  Yozo lost himself in his inability to relate to others and it lead to him losing his own sense of humanity.  But I am human.”  She smiles to herself.  “So I’m the antonym of Yozo.”

Ken smiles back and shifts the topic ever so slightly to Dazai and his other works, carefully stepping around the invitation to share his own opinion on the matter.  His own favorite work, Takatsuki’s _The Black Goat’s Egg_ , is at the forefront of his mind, and his own similarities to the child of the titular monster on the tip of his tongue.  The difference between him and Eika is that he cannot find too many ways in which he differs, not enough points that he can safely say he is an antonym of the child of the black goat.

He is not human, and the thought is in the back of his head throughout their conversation, as well as his musings as to what sort of horrified look Eika might have on her face if he were to tell the truth.

Eika, a long-time adversary to his attempts to manipulate the conversation, manages to turn it around somehow, subtly, bringing up tragedies, as it’s supposedly what her literature class is going over right now.  Not coincidentally, it is also the secondary genre of his favorite author--after horror, of course--and he’s sure she knows that.  

“Tragedies can also be quite relatable,” Eika says.

Ken nods.  “Shakespearean tragedies in particular have a really smooth structure that eases you right in.  I believe it can be broken down into parts, the first being exposition.”  Everything that came before, the introductory chapter, the prologue, a woman who worked for the happiness of everyone but herself until she was ragged, bled dry, dead.  Ken’s tragedy begins with a father whose face he doesn’t know and a dead mother whose legacy he inherits.  It is better to hurt than to be hurt by others--that is his fatal flaw.

“And then the development, right?” Eika asks, “And a change in fortune.”

“Followed by the climax, and the resolution.”

The full cast is introduced; Hide barges into his life, holds on, and refuses to let go.  Touka is a regular backdrop during his innocent days at Anteiku, an omen of things to come, silently pitying him from the corner of the cafe.  

And then Rize enters from stage right, gives him a charming smile that makes his stomach flutter, and leads him away as the curtain falls, end scene.  His tragedy seems, for the most part, to be over.  

“What happened to you?” he asks softly, not that anyone cares to listen in, the other patrons absorbed in their reading material.   _What was your tragedy?_

Eika’s face flushes and she gives a shy smile.  “It doesn’t matter,” she says with a passive wave.  Ken wants to insists that it does matter, that he wants to know, needs to know, that if they’re both living in the same genre it’ll make him feel better to know that he’s not the only one.

“I always thought,” he says, “That any story with me cast as the lead would be a tragedy.”  

He didn’t realize he was leaning in so close, or that she had been, either.  Eika’s eyes are nervously avoiding his, but she isn’t moving away from him, hands in her lap, pulling at the ends of her sleeves.  “Then you should change it,” she murmurs.

“I don’t know if I can.”

“You did it for me.”

He pauses.  “Yeah,” he whispers, “I guess I did,” and with a surge of bravery, closes what little distance is between them.

It lasted all of two seconds, when Touka suddenly appeared next to the table and demanded he cover for her, and Eika pulled back looking absolutely mortified while Ken tried to apologize.  Touka yanked him back to the counter, muttering that talking was one thing and locking lips was entirely another, and he nodded and nervously agreed, but when Eika gave him one more shaky smile as she packed her bag to leave, he found himself thinking that it had been worth it.

“See you tomorrow,” she says as she passes, promising something more with those words.

“Yeah.  Tomorrow,” Ken agrees, ignoring the way Touka rolls her eyes when he waves at her.  

Small steps, he’s decided.  Eika took small steps to get to where she is now, one small goal for every day, and Ken wants to do the same.  Tomorrow, he knows from the way she looks at him and blushes and laughs, the way she held on because of him, that Eika is going to confess to him, and he’s not going to turn her down.  It might be difficult, and it might be painful at times, but he’s certain that, with small steps, he can make it work, just like Yoshimura said.

 _One thing at a time,_ he reminds himself, feeling so genuinely happy for the first time in weeks, smiling stupidly long after she’s gone, oblivious to the rising of the curtain, the arrival of an unfamiliar face, and the beginning of the next scene.

Ken Kaneki thinks his tragedy is over, and he is a fool, because it is only just beginning.

*

Today is the day.

Eika Ishihara has been preparing herself for this day since she decided that she was going to live.  It isn’t fair to put the burden of her will to live on another person, but she can’t deny that Ken Kaneki played an important role in reminding her that the world was not as dark as she made it out to be.  That first trip to Anteiku made her realize that she is not alone in the world, even it was at the time a complete stranger whom she found herself connecting with.  So now, seventeen days later--she’s been counting--her feelings of affection have solidified into something more, something stronger, something that she doesn’t want to keep to herself.  

Today, she is going to confess to Ken Kaneki.

She’s prepared herself for rejection--he’s a little older, after all, and he’s studying seriously, so maybe he won’t be interested.  But she wants to start doing things differently, and that means being open and telling people how she feels.  If nothing else, Anteiku is still a place she’ll go, and Ken is still a person she’ll talk to, even if they’re only friends.

The moment her class is dismissed, she throws her books into her bag, makes a beeline for the lockers, and starts heading downtown, walking faster and faster until she’s running, unable to contain her excitement.  Today is the first day of her new life, one in which she is the antonym of Yozo, and she loves the feeling of the light breeze fluttering her uniform, of the sunlight on her face, even of the ache in her legs from running.  It feels wonderful to be alive, to be able to feel at all.  It’s wonderful to be human.

People are turning to stare at her as she gets closer to the cafe, some with wide eyes, some in confusion or pity, but hardly notices, hardly cares, too elated to be bothered by what other people are thinking, and she feels her heart beating faster in her chest as she rounds the corner, smiling so wide her face is sore, and her eyes open wide and Anteiku is--!

*

“Closed for repairs,” says the waitress Eika remembers seeing from time to time, one eye covered by her dark bangs.  “Sorry.”  Behind her, Eika sees the windows she used to gaze out of are shattered, and the countertop is cracked.  It looks like someone rammed their car through the side of the cafe.

“That’s alright,” Eika says, “Do you have any idea when you’ll be open again?”

“Probably in a few days.”

“Ah.  Okay.”  She glances back at Anteiku again.  “Um.  This might seem like a weird question, but have you seen Kaneki today?  I guess he wouldn’t have come in since you’re closed, but I was hoping to talk to him.”

The waitress’s gaze slowly shifts away from Eika, almost anxiously.  She swallows, looks at the ground.  “Sorry,” she says hoarsely, “I have no idea where he is.”

Something about the way she says it makes Eika nervous.  “Thanks anyway,” she says and starts walking back towards home, much slower than before.  

It’s alright, she tells herself, she can wait.  She’s waited this long to be absolutely certain of her feelings and to steel her resolve, she can wait a few more days.  And she does.  She checks back every day, watching as new furniture comes in and the counters are repaired and the window is replaced.  She watches as the “open” sign is placed back in the door and customers return.  She watches the quiet waitress stand in the corner, eyes empty, gazing out onto the street like she’s looking for someone.

She watches for Ken Kaneki, day after day.

She never sees him again.


	7. Addendum

Several months later, as a student at Kamii’s literature department, Eika decides to write a memoir on her attempted suicide.  “A memoir,” she’d laughed about it before when discussing it with her professor, “Aren’t I too young to write a memoir?”  But it’s something she feels strongly about, something she thinks needs to be addressed in a country where so many young people are doing what she almost did.  She writes about standing at the edge of the cliff and looking down, and the vertigo that overtook her, the dizzyingly freeing feeling she got as she realized she would die if she jumped.  She would die, and it would be over.

Putting into words why she hesitated isn’t easy.  She keeps coming back to the same section and writing and rewriting it, because she still isn’t sure what made her wait.  But she writes in vivid detail the feeling in her chest when she heard her name, when she turned and saw a young man—whose name she does not give—rushing towards her.  She labors over that single passage over and over, because she feels like it’s one of the most important scenes in the book.  She has to get it right.

The missing posters that had gone up are almost entirely gone from campus, a few lingering on largely overlooked corkboards in the corners department offices, and Eika’s gaze passes over them as she walks by, her heart aching, her eyes stinging with tears. 

She thinks Ken Kaneki must have gone back to that ledge and jumped.

He said he wanted to live, but she remembers how lost he looked that night when they both sat awake in his apartment, how he put his head in his hands, and she knew, in that moment, that he truly understood her.  She knew he must have had the same feelings at one time, maybe even stood where she had been standing.  They had never told each other the opening acts of each other’s tragedies, the buildup to the change in fortune, the necessary exposition to truly know what happened.  Eika regrets not telling him when she asked, but she made her policy of honesty a day too late.

Just a day.

Sometimes, she thinks, it takes even less than that.  If Ken had been a minute later, she might’ve been at the bottom of the gorge, too.

She chooses to live now, to go to school, to study what she wants to study, to read books and relate to them and write them, and to do all the things that Ken might’ve if he were still there.  Eika has bought every book ever written by Sen Takatsuki and is well on her way to reading them all, marking up the margins and wondering what it was about her writing that Ken liked most, because she finds that she has trouble relating.

She’s on her way back towards campus after a late night out at the bookstore, and she’s getting off the train, head buried in a book, when she bumps into someone and nearly loses her balance.  “Sorry,” she mutters, catching herself on the wall of the closest building, “I wasn’t paying attention.”

“It’s alright,” the stranger says, “Be careful,” and keeps going.  Eika doesn’t get a good look at him in the dark, catching little more than white hair hanging over his eyes, but there’s something about his voice that makes her hesitate, stopping mid-stride, turning it over in her head because she thinks she should recognize it. 

“Excuse me,” she asks, and he stops a few feet away.  “Do I know you?”

He doesn’t turn around immediately.  “Do I seem familiar?”

“Yes.”  She pauses.  “Maybe you just remind me of someone I read about recently.”

“Really?  You remind me of someone from a book, too.”  He pauses.  “Rather, you remind me of his antonym.”

She blinks and he’s right in front of her, and Eika has no time to respond.

The kiss is the same, chaste and hurried with a hint of hunger, ending far too soon.  With a rush of air, the stranger is gone, and Eika opens her eyes to find she’s all alone.  She touches her lips, still tingling, still warm, tears forming in the corners of her eyes.

Ken Kaneki did not throw himself into the darkness below the underpass; she knows that now.

But that is all she knows.

The rest of it is a story—a tragedy—that she is not a part of.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please remember all of your belongings as you get off the ride.
> 
> As much as I would like to see a happy ending, I just don't think it's plausible. Thanks for sticking with me this far. I'm tossing around another idea for Tokyo Ghoul, so look out for that in the next few weeks.


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